en he went trudging homeward. He was smiling, his own shy, secret
smile. He held his head erect and looked ahead of him as if in the
far, far distance he had seen something, a beckoning something,
toward which he was to strive. Barefooted Peter, poverty-stricken,
lonely Peter for the first time glimpsed the purple heights.

CHAPTER II

THE PROMISE

It is written in the Live Green Book that one may not stumble upon
one of its secrets without at the same discovering something about
others quite as fascinating and worth exploring. This is a wise and
blessed law, which the angels of the Little Peoples are always
trying to have enforced. Peter Champneys suspected the Red Admiral
of being a fairy; so when he ran fleet-footed over the fields and
through the woods and alongside the worm-fences after the Admiral,
the angels of the Little Peoples turned his boyish head aside and
made him see birds' wings, and bees, and the shapes of leaves, and
the colors of trees and clouds, and the faces of flowers. It is
further written that one may not intimately know the Little Peoples
without loving them. When one begins to love, one begins to grow.
Peter, then, was growing.

Lying awake in the dark now wasn't a thing to be dreaded; the dark
was no longer filled with shapes of fear, for Peter was beginning to
discover in himself a power of whose unique and immense value he was
not as yet aware. It was the great power of being able clearly to
visualize things, of bringing before his mind's eye whatever he had
seen, with every distinction of shape and size and color sharply
present, and accurately to portray it in the absence of the
original. If one should ask him, "What's the shape of the milkweed
butterfly's wing, and the color of the spice-bush swallowtail, Peter
Champneys? What does the humming-bird's nest look like? What's the
color of the rainbow-snake and of the cotton-mouth moccasin? What's
the difference between the ironweed and the aster?"--Ask Peter
things like that, and lend him a bit of paper and a pencil, and he
literally had the answers at his finger-tips.

But they never asked him what would, to him, have been natural
questions; they wished him, instead, to tell them where the Onion
River flows, and the latitude of the middle of Kamchatka, and to
spell phthisis, and on what date the Battle of Somethingorother was
fought, and if a man buys old iron at such a price, and makes it
over into stoves weighing so much,